Mona Sans & Hubot Sans
Two new lovely open source variable fonts from Github.
Link tags: github
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How we think about browsers | The GitHub Blog
JavaScript doesn’t get executed on very old browsers when native syntax for new language features is encountered. However, thanks to GitHub being built following the principle of progressive enhancement, users of older browsers still get to interact with basic features of GitHub, while users with more capable browsers get a faster experience.
That’s the way to do it!
Concepts like progressive enhancement allow us to deliver the best experience possible to the majority of customers, while delivering a useful experience to those using older browsers.
Read on for the nitty-gritty details…
Add support for defining a theme color for both light & dark modes (prefers color scheme)
There’s a good discussion here (kicked off by Jen) about providing different theme-color values in a web app manifest to match prefers-color-scheme in media queries.
How Web Components Are Used at GitHub and Salesforce – The New Stack
I’m very taken with Github’s tab-container element—this is exactly how I think web components should be designed!
Enable/unmute WebAudio on iOS, even while mute switch is on
Remember when I wrote about Web Audio weirdness on iOS? Well, this is a nice little library that wraps up the same hacky solution that I ended up using.
It’s always gratifying when something you do—especially something that feels so hacky—turns out to be independently invented elsewhere.
No cookie for you - The GitHub Blog
I wish more companies would realise that this is a perfectly reasonable approach to take:
We decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really. 🤔
So, we have removed all non-essential cookies from GitHub, and visiting our website does not send any information to third-party analytics services.
Let’s Define CSS 4 · Issue #4770 · w3c/csswg-drafts
Jen kicked off a fascinating thread here:
It’s come up quite a few times recently that the world of people who make websites would greatly benefit from the CSS Working Group officially defining ”CSS 4”, and later “CSS 5“, etc.
The level is discourse is impressively smart and civil.
Personally, I don’t (yet) have an opinion on this either way, but I’ll be watching it unfold with keen interest.
Adding Response Metadata to Cache API Explainer by Aaron Gustafson and Jungkee Song
This is a great proposal that would make the Cache API even more powerful by adding metadata to cached items, like when it was cached, how big it is, and how many times it’s been retrieved.
The GitHub Archive Program will safely store every public GitHub repo for 1,000 years in the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard, Norway.
This is a fascinating project from Github, the Long Now Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Bodleian Library and others. All of the public code on Github on February 2nd, 2020 will be archived for 1000 years in a vault in Svalbard.
Mind you, given the amount of dependencies that most “modern” code projects rely on, I can’t foresee the code working after 1000 days.
“Never-Slow Mode” (a.k.a. “Slightly-Fast Mode”) Explained
I would very much like this to become a reality.
Never-Slow Mode (“NSM”) is a mode that sites can opt-into via HTTP header. For these sites, the browser imposes per-interaction resource limits, giving users a better user experience, potentially at the cost of extra developer work. We believe users are happier and more engaged on fast sites, and NSM attempts to make it easier for sites to guarantee speed to users. In addition to user experience benefits, sites might want to opt in because browsers could providing UI to users to indicate they are in “fast mode” (a TLS lock icon but for speed).
AccentDesign/Fractal-Atomic: An awesome starter point for your Fractal UI component library
If you want to use Brad’s Atomic Design naming convention—atoms, molecules, etc.—and you like using Fractal for making your components, this starter kit is just for you:
Keep what you need, delete what you don’t and add whatever you like on top of whats already there.
mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog: Switch from Medium to your own blog in a few minutes
Following on from Stackbit’s tool, here’s another (more code-heavy) way of migrating from Ev’s blog to your own site.
github/details-menu-element
Now this is how you design a web component! A great example of progressive enhancement by Mu-An Chiou that’s used all over Github: a details element that gets turbo-charged into a details-menu.
There’s also a slidedeck explaining the whole thing.
CSS Remedy
This is a really interesting approach that isn’t quite a CSS reset or a normalisation. Instead, it’s an experiment to reimagine what a default browser stylesheet would be like if it were created today, without concerns about backwards compatibility:
Applies basic styling to form elements and controls, getting you started with custom styling. We want to find the balance between providing a base for implementing a custom design, and allowing OS-level control over how form inputs work (like how a number pad works on iOS).
Provides a very lightweight starter file, with generic visual styling that you will want to replace. This isn’t as robust or opinionated as a starter-theme or framework. We’ve leaned toward specifying less, so you have less to override. (We haven’t defined any font families, for example.)
You can contribute by adding issues.
Tutorial Markdown
Tim recently gave an excellent talk at FFConf. He mentioned this variation of Markdown, specifically for writing coding tutorials that update as you scroll. You can see it in action on his Generative Artistry site.
Kind of reminds of some of Bret Viktor’s work.
[css-exclusions] Status of the exclusions spec #3308
Remember when I said that if we want to see CSS exclusions implemented in browsers, we need to make some noise?
Well, Rachel is taking names, so if you’ve got a use-case, let her know.
Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend | GitHub Engineering
You really don’t need jQuery any more …and that’s thanks to jQuery.
Here, the Github team talk through their process of swapping out jQuery for vanilla JavaScript, as well as their forays into web components (or at least the custom elements bit).
GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5 Billion Undo Button - Bloomberg
Paul Ford explains version control in a way that is clear and straightforward, while also being wistful and poetic.
I had idle fantasies about what the world of technology would look like if, instead of files, we were all sharing repositories and managing our lives in git: book projects, code projects, side projects, article drafts, everything. It’s just so damned … safe. I come home, work on something, push the changes back to the master repository, and download it when I get to work. If I needed to collaborate with other people, nothing would need to change. I’d just give them access to my repositories (repos, for short). I imagined myself handing git repos to my kids. “These are yours now. Iteratively add features to them, as I taught you.”
I Used The Web For A Day With JavaScript Turned Off — Smashing Magazine
Following on from Charlie’s experiment last year, Chris Ashton has been assessing which sites rely on JavaScript, and which sites use it in a more defensive, resilient way. Some interesting results in here.
A good core experience is indicative of a well-structured web page, which, in turn, is usually a good sign for SEO and for accessibility. It’s usually a well designed web page, as the designer and developer have spent time and effort thinking about what’s truly core to the experience. Progressive enhancement means more robust experiences, with fewer bugs in production and fewer individual browser quirks, because we’re letting the platform do the job rather than trying to write it all from scratch.
alphagov/accessible-autocomplete: An autocomplete component, built to be accessible.
If you’re looking for an accessible standalone autocomplete script, this one from GDS looks very good (similar to Lea’s awesomplete).